German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Visualization and “Git” Framing

  • Many note that this is really a GitHub‑style heatmap, not a “git contribution graph” in the commit‑graph sense.
  • Some felt mildly click‑baited, expecting branches/merges or something like Gource rather than a calendar heatmap.
  • Several stress the distinction “git ≠ GitHub,” though others argue the colloquial usage is understandable.

Existing “Law in Git” / Open Data Efforts

  • Examples shared:
    • Washington DC’s laws in GitHub, where a pull request once changed the law.
    • An old, now‑unmaintained Bundestag repo with laws in Markdown and PRs per party proposal.
    • A community‑maintained weekly scraper of German laws (XML) and projects building IDE‑like HTML/JSON readers on top.
    • Belgian and French initiatives that archive official journals and codes, exporting versions to Markdown and git.
  • Users appreciate these as beautiful, accessible front‑ends over already‑public but hard‑to‑discover government data.

Version Control as a Model for Law

  • Many see strong analogies: laws as files, amendments as diffs, gazettes as commits, codifications as the tip of main, and case law as “monkey patches.”
  • Some civil‑law explanations show how amendment acts already read like manual git diffs (“replace sentence X with…”).
  • Others argue that in some systems the “commits” (statutes/bills) are the source of truth, making the conceptual mapping messier.

Practical and Legal Complexities

  • Skeptics say simply dumping legal texts into git is nearly useless without cross‑references, court decisions, planned changes, locality filters, etc.
  • There’s debate over whether version control truly fits lawmaking, given layered amendments, case law, and non‑codified sources.
  • Some insist VC is essential for traceability (“git blame” on a statute); others say a database plus good UIs matter more than git itself.

Transparency, Politics, and Public Access

  • Enthusiasts want “git‑first” parliaments or even blockchain to track who added which clause, in real time.
  • Pushback: full process transparency can backfire, turning negotiation into grandstanding and purity tests, especially in majoritarian systems; some secrecy may be necessary for compromise.
  • Others counter that voters still need reliable records of who did what; minutes and press coverage are cited as partial solutions.

Implementation and Technical Concerns

  • Issues raised: SHA‑1’s weakness for adversarial contexts, git’s awkwardness with pre‑1970 timestamps, and the need for sentence‑level or word‑level diffs.
  • Users report that LLM‑generated summaries and the site’s handling of certain votes can be misleading, especially around recommendation vs. original motion.
  • Several propose richer tooling: IDE‑like law browsers, custom diff drivers, or structured “law as code” formats being explored in Europe.